Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years: A Novel

FRESH, FUNNY, AND POIGNANT.
The Christian Science Monitor

Ladder of Years has charm galore. Tyler does a lovely job painting Delias entry into her new world.

Newsweek

For the sheer delight of reading wonderful English prose, Anne Tyler has few, if any, peers. Her characters possess quirks that intrigue the reader without overshadowing their essential humanness.

USA Today

The French have said that William Wyler, the great director of movies like Dodsworth and The Best Years of Our Lives, had a style sans style. Anne Tyler has this same deceptive style without a style. She does nothing fancy, nothing tricky. But so rigorous and artful is the style without style, so measured and delicate is each observation, so complex is the structure and so astute and open the language, that the reader can relax, feel secure in the narrative, and experience the work as something real and natural even inevitable. In Ladder of Years, the story that appears to unfold of its own accord is a fairy tale of sorts, a fairy tale with echoes of both the tragedy of King Lear and the absurdity of the modern romance novel.

The New York Times Book Review

Ladder of Years is the story of a fugue to change ones life. It is told in Tylers characteristic manner, one that no other American writer approaches. Just as she subverts the domestic with fantasy her situations are earthbound until you notice that they are gliding along two inches above the earth she subverts fantasy with the domestic.

Los Angeles Times Book Review

Universal street-penny poignance is what gives Tylers fiction its emotional weight as well as its sheen.

The Boston Sunday Globe

Exhilarating Ladder of Years is not just a novel of middle age; learning how to say goodbye, how to find another path to the harmony one needs to discover are tasks even the young face.

The Dallas Morning News

HAUNTING, MELANCHOLY

The characters feel so real that we find ourselves thinking about them, worrying if they made the right choices, long after weve read about them. [Tyler] artfully illuminates the complexity burrowing beneath the surface of ordinary lives as people fight off despair and loneliness with ferocious, if misguided, tenacity.

The Miami Herald

Well worth reading Ladder of Years is not about the life of one woman; it is about the American tendency to idealize the traditional family of the 50s, when men ruled the roost and women were expected to be submissive.

San Francisco Chronicle

Tyler mixes some bitter with the sweet When the sheer dailiness of ordinary life seems terminally humdrum, who has not entertained the fantasy? Just cut and run That relatively few people actually follow up on this impulse may testify to the power of inertia or the naggings of conscience, or to some tedious combination of both. Thanks to the magic of Anne Tylers fiction, Delia Grinstead, the heroine of Ladder of Years, is largely freed from such constraints.

Time

What is perhaps most fascinating is that Tyler has the grace and skill to involve readers so deeply that they want to fight with the characters. This is a writer who knows, above all, how to draw people so real that you cant help but care what becomes of them.

St. Petersburg Times

Tyler continues to delight readers with a cast of lovable misfits and elegant, but accessible prose. She makes mealtime spats and pre-wedding jitters as riveting and vivid as Hollywood car chases.

New York Daily News

Ladder of Years is tough to resist.

Detroit Free Press

POIGNANT, WARM, AND QUIRKY

Perhaps no one writing fiction today can so clearly evoke middle-age angst as Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Tyler.

Library Journal

[A] pastel emotional journey of self-discovery It unfolds so gracefully that its characters seem to blossom and grow almost imperceptibly until they have fully engaged our interest, our sympathy, and our understanding. [A] poignant, quiet tale.

The State (Columbia, SC)

Tylers penchant for orchestrating hordes of quirky personalities, her facility with digressive but relevant subplots are hallmarks of all her books.

The News & Observer (North Carolina)

One of the satisfactions of this novel is Tylers evocation of typical family life. [She] engages our sympathy and growing respect for a character who finally realizes that the ladder of years is a time trip to the future.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

[A] charming, often hilarious, and astute novel Tyler is in top form here. Her seemingly effortless prose is, like silk, rich in subtle hues and sheeny with dancing light. [She] offers keen and provocative insights into the cycles of family life, shifting emotional needs, and the process of aging.

Booklist (boxed review)

Another agreeably offbeat journey back to Tyler country, where the characters who will fill the big, slightly dowdy, old houses are spellbound by their own homely lives, their routines, their family stories, their recipes for mint pea soup until something happens to break the spell. All of Tylers trademarks are here: comedy, the sweet, blunt edges of romance, and characters so perfectly, achingly drawn you can never decide whether theyre the most oddball or most everyday people youve ever come across.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

ALSO BY ANNE TYLER

If Morning Ever Comes

The Tin Can Tree

A Slipping-Down Life

The Clock Winder

Celestial Navigation

Searching for Caleb

Earthly Possessions

Morgans Passing

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

The Accidental Tourist

Breathing Lessons

Saint Maybe

BALTIMORE WOMAN DISAPPEARS DURING FAMILY VACATION

Delaware State Police announced early today that Cordelia F. Grinstead, 40, wife of a Roland Park physician, has been reported missing while on holiday with her family in Bethany Beach.

Mrs. Grinstead was last seen around noon this past Monday, walking south along the stretch of sand between Bethany and Sea Colony.

Witnesses of her departureher husband, Dr. Samuel Grinstead, 55, and her three children, Susan, 21, Ramsay, 19, and Carroll, 15were unable to recall any suspicious characters in the vicinity. They reported that to the best of their recollection she simply strolled away. Her failure to return was not remarked until late afternoon.

A slender, small-boned woman with curly fair or light-brown hair, Mrs. Grinstead stands 52 or possibly 55 and weighs either 90 or 110 pounds. Her eyes are blue or gray or perhaps green, and her nose is mildly sunburned in addition to being freckled.

Presumably she was carrying a large straw tote trimmed with a pink bow, but family members could not agree upon her clothing. In all probability it was something pink or blue, her husband suggested, either frilled or lacy or looking kind of baby-doll.

Authorities do not suspect drowning, since Mrs. Grinstead avoided swimming whenever possible and professed a distinct aversion to water. In fact, her sister, Eliza Felson, 52, has alleged to reporters that the missing woman may have been a cat in her most recent incarnation.